Gender-toxic people: who they are and how to communicate with them

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Communicating with those who hate the opposite sex can seriously hurt self-esteem. We will tell you how to recognize such people and why they behave this way.

Surely it happened to you: you meet some new person at work or in a company, he or she casually chatting with you, tells some kind of anecdote, but after a seemingly funny story for some reason inside it becomes somehow unpleasant, like as if you were stained with something. It was so? If your interlocutor is of the opposite sex, you can be sure: you are faced with a gender-toxic person, communication with whom is fraught with certain consequences.

Let's figure out who they are, how to identify these people among their colleagues and acquaintances, and how best to behave with them.

Who are gender-toxic people

These are people who have many negative beliefs against members of the opposite sex. Simply put, women who experience conscious or unconscious hatred and aggression towards men, and men who experience similar experiences towards women.

How to identify such people in your environment

This is not always easy. Of course, such people do not start, upon seeing an object of the opposite sex, shower it with insults, splashing saliva. More often than not, their negative feelings are expressed much more subtly - for example, in a passive-aggressive style. It might look something like this.

Men

Communicating with a woman, such a man will not say that "all women are lying bitches" or something like that. But he can tell an anecdote or a life story in which women appear in an extremely unfavorable light.

So, if a joke is told about blondes, your interlocutor is trying to show how stupid women are at times (and if you are a woman, then you are the same). And if this is a story from life, then he can tell, for example, how a certain project at his work was entrusted to his female colleague, and she not only did not cope, but in general almost ditched him. And only the intervention of a man (himself or one of his male colleagues) made it possible to bring the situation out of the crisis … In this case, he broadcasts to you the message “women are incompetent,” which means that you personally are too.

Women

Women who feel hatred and aggression towards men behave in a similar way. They don't have any jokes about stupid blond men, so they use a strategy that psychologists call "psychological castration." To do this, they tell stories, ask certain questions or behave in such a way as to show the man with whom they are talking, his inability to solve problems, mediocrity, worthlessness, lack of initiative, that is, they devalue him.

- I studied at the pedagogical faculty, and you?

- Oh, wow! And I thought that only girls study there.

(Meaning of the message: "You are not a man.")

- I run the IT department at N.

- Oh, I heard about your office and its wage policy. In our company, even ordinary employees receive more than your leading specialists. How do you work there in general …

(The meaning of the message: “You are not respected at your work, and you do not respect yourself.”)

In other words, any information you provide can be modified and presented in such a way that you can be sure: in the resulting picture you will look very so-so, no matter how great your career and personal achievements.

What happens during such a conversation between people

So, a gender-toxic person in a socially acceptable form presents all members of the opposite sex in a funny, stupid, unpleasant way. Since he is trying to humiliate the entire opposite sex, then his interlocutor begins to feel humiliated. Hence this unpleasant feeling of being dirty, mentioned above.

If the person on whom such a psychological attack was carried out is in contact with himself and his feelings and does not have a tendency to masochism, most likely he will intuitively understand that his communication with the interlocutor is somehow “not like that” and will try to stop it.

Other people who, for some reason, have a slightly less developed skill to listen to themselves and their needs, can communicate with a gender-toxic person for a long time and at a conscious level do not even know that something is wrong.

However, continuing such communication lowers self-esteem, because time after time you are forced to withstand the attack on your femininity or masculinity.

Such attacks, carried out for a long time, do not pass without a trace for our psyche and can cause problems in relationships with the opposite sex - up to the impossibility of creating stable relationships, starting a family.

Why are these people like that

Most often, the cause of the behavior of a gender-toxic person is psychological trauma inflicted on him - both in childhood and, possibly, in the recent past.

For example, a boy who grows up with a mother who suffocates his control may later consider all women to be aggressive and intruders. As a defense against such behavior, he may strategize when he attacks first himself, in order to protect himself from over-control.

In women, a mirror situation arises. For example, a girl who grew up in a family from which her father left, leaving her mother, may unconsciously stand up to protect her mother from all these "mean" and "evil" men. And in adulthood, this negative charge remains and continues to pour out on the representatives of the opposite sex already in an automatic mode.

Why can't they stop

What do these stories above have in common? In both cases, the poisonous blows of gender-toxic people do not hit those whom they were actually intended for (a parental figure of the opposite sex, a former partner), but “random targets” - people who are simply within reach. This means that such blows do not bring any satisfaction to these people. Therefore, and how to take revenge on the opposite sex, they fail.

It's like a thirst that cannot be quenched in any way, because water, as in that joke about a drinking elk, does not go for the future. It's not about the water.

The moose came to drink and began to drink. The hunter noticed him and fired, but the elk stood as it was. The hunter fires over and over. He hits the moose, but he still stands and drinks.

"What? - thinks the moose. - I seem to drink, but I'm getting worse and worse!"

Likewise, gender-toxic people: deep down, they expect their aggressive behavior to make them feel better, but instead only worsen their already difficult relationships with people.

What are the risks of communicating with gender-toxic people?

Surprisingly, many gender-toxic people deliberately have no idea that they are attacking. How can they not guess what feelings they really have for people of the opposite sex.

They often inflict these blows unconsciously, without realizing it. And unconscious actions have one feature: they can be very subtle. When you went to a party, talked to people, returned home, went to bed, and only after a couple of days, you finally understood why you were so uncomfortable that evening.

It would seem that such: talked to someone, and this conversation did not work out. Conversations are not always comfortable. This is probably true, but it's worth remembering one thing: by engaging in such communication, you are voluntarily subjected to psychological abuse.

In fact, during this interaction, you are bombarded every second with messages of "you are nothing!" and “people like you should have been killed in childhood” (based on gender, of course).

If you were told something like that in plain text, such a conversation would quickly end. And in a conversation with hidden messages, an alarm beacon somewhere inside us works very quietly. But for our psyche it makes no difference whether this is said directly or covertly. Our unconscious is smart, it will still decipher these poisonous messages and make you understand it with discomfort. Then why endure such interaction?

How to deal with gender-toxic people

The main advice that can be given here is to listen carefully to yourself when communicating with other people, especially when meeting them. If in the course of communication you feel a change in your emotional state, this is an alarming sign: something is wrong in your interaction.

Take care of yourself: If you don't like this change, get out of that contact.

The person with whom you have just talked hates people of the opposite sex, and such interaction is psychologically harmful in the first place for you. You can hardly help him, but catching considerable discomfort is easy. If at all possible, stop communicating with this person or keep communication to a minimum.

What to do if you notice gender toxicity in yourself

If you recognize yourself in the descriptions above, or found in yourself only some of the signs of gender-toxic people, you should not panic: we all are from time to time. In such cases, it is worth thinking about getting a few consultations from a psychologist: this will help to better understand who your aggressive charge is actually directed at and what can be done in order to channel this energy in a more constructive direction.